Physical access

You can do a lot if you have physical access to a computer.

Stealing login sessions with PoisonTap

PoisonTap is a pocket-sized Raspberry Pi device that you can plug into a computer’s USB port. It impersonates a new wired network connection and responds to outbound HTTP traffic. If the computer’s user is logged on to any of an extensive list of popular web sites, PoisonTap is able to capture the cookies and write them to a text file on the USB device.This works even if the screen is locked.

If your character needs to gain access to someone’s online accounts, your character could follow her target to the coffee shop, wait for the target to go to the bathroom, plug this device into the target’s computer for a minute, and be gone before the victim knew what was happening. If the target happened to be logged on to the online resource your character needs to access, she’ll have the session IDs on the USB drive. She may need to hurry: those session IDs will become invalid as soon as the target logs out of those web sites.

Reading the MacOS FileVault2 password with PCILeech

This is a vulnerability that Apple patched just this month, so it wouldn’t work on a real-world Mac running Sierra v10.12.2 or better. But Macs were vulnerable to this particular exploit for more than four months.

PCILeech refers to a mix of hardware and software that your character could use to break in to an unpatched Mac. The video shows using a laptop attached to the device that your character would plug into the target Mac. (Maybe it would be possible to use something smaller, like a tablet or a Raspberry Pi or Arduino.)

PCILeech is able to recover the FileVault2 password from the Mac’s memory after rebooting the Mac. Once your character has the FileVault password, she has full access to the Mac. This will work even if the Mac is locked with a screensaver or hibernating, but it won’t work if the Mac is completely powered off. And the target might notice that his Mac rebooted.

USB kill stick

And if your character just wants to destroy a target device, there’s the USB kill stick. It’s a USB device that looks like a harmless thumb drive. It has several capacitors that start drawing power as soon as it’s plugged in. When the capacitors are charged (which appears to take no time at all), the kill stick rapidly discharges the capacitors right back into the port. Some devices have hardware protection against this, but many do not. The video on the page shows the researcher plugging the stick into several devices, frying many of them. It makes a lovely noise when that happens.